Friday, 29 July 2011

First of all, sorry about the erratic posting lately! I have come to the conclusion that writing posts about one specific topic every day is hard work! Especially when somebody (me!) preferred to spent the weekend lying in the sun, reading and napping, instead of preparing their blogging week. Normally, after a weekend of being otherwise engaged, I would just post about whatever takes my fancy in the following days, but I did promise you a month of wedding posts, after all!!!

So here comes the one for today! And in keeping with the recent tradition of giving you music-related content on a Friday, this is a post about our wedding ceremony and the music that we chose for it. Our registrar gave us free range for our soundtrack, she only asked us to abstain from religious content for our civil ceremony and to let her listen to our choices for approval.

I scanned the program for the ceremony for you, because it has all the texts for our readings and the song lyrics for our music. Like the Save The Dates, I designed this in Word, using Home Sweet Home and the MS font Georgia. It also contained information about the wedding party and the ceremony in English and German. You can click on the photos for a closer look. I am also linking each reading and song title to an online source, a video or a stream, if you would like a look and a listen.

For our readings, I had chosen a poem by EE Cummings, read by my very good friend Ivonne, and Marco went with the lyrics of the Leonard Cohen song Dance Me To The End Of Love, which he had asked his brother Nino to read.

I had never been one of those girls who have their whole wedding planned by the age of 10, so I had no idea what tune I would like to walk down the aisle to. But when Pearl Jam's album Backspacer was released in fall 2009 and I heard the song Just Breathe, I knew that that was THE ONE. The lyrics are just perfect, about loving somebody for the rest of your life and making sure that they know you love them. And Pearl Jam has been my favourite band like pretty much forever. I still get tears in my eyes every time I hear it now, because it reminds me of what Marco and I have together.

After we had said our vows and exchanged rings, it was time to sign the register. We asked for Bruce Springsteen's If I Should Fall Behind to be played in the background. Marco is a big fan, and I don't think The Boss is all that bad myself. Again, the lyrics suited our relationship, with the song being about travelling together and watching out for each other.

The last piece of music was Don't Falter by Mint Royale, a very happy song about love. Not that being presented as Mr. and Mrs. for the very first time did not make us happy enough already! My favourite part of the song is when Lauren Laverne sings Now everything is fine, because he is officially mine and as long as we've got each other, it's gonna be officially summer! Too right! And we will try to never ever let that summer end, either.

The last page of the program had a map with directions to the reception venue and a little pocket for a handkerchief. I had collected vintage handkerchiefs from friends and family for this purpose, and bought a big batch on eBay, too. Some of our guests said that they were really grateful that we had provided them with one, because for some reason they needed to wipe their eyes! I think we made them cry and hearing them sniffle behind us also got Marco and me really tearful in return.

All the photos in this post were either taken by Stefan, my aunt Christa or my dad-in-law. I shall leave you with a wish for a happy weekend, filled with love & joy!

Not sure if I am the last to know, but I just discovered this handy trick to make pinning a bit smoother. You know how you always have to give a description of your pin before putting it up on your board? I found out by accident that you can save yourself the typing! And that was great news, for a lazy yet meticulous person like me!

So, when you highlight any of the words on the page that you are pinning from, like I did with "summer stitch school" on The Floss Box below and then hit your PIN button, the words will copy into the little Pinterest pop up window!

Like this:

Genius. But then , I am easily pleased... I just thought I'd share this with you, just in case.

P.S.: If you are waiting for today's wedding post, bear with me! There will be one later!

I had the fortune of that rare summer sunshine falling on a day of home working.

Hell yeah!

So I had this salad with raspberries, stripey beetroot, an egg sprinkled with Chaat Masala and some French goat's cheese. And the single pansy flower that came in the lettuce bag from my veg box delivery.

Thursday, 28 July 2011

Favours are not really a common tradition at German weddings. But I loved the idea of giving people little special gifts as a thank you for their attendance on our important day. And in Canada, as in other English speaking countries, favours are an integral part at the reception.

I wanted our favours to be something that would represent us and the wedding, and I thought it would be nice if people could not only keep them as a reminder of the day, but also if they had some kind of practical potential.

Now, I have a serious obsession with canvas bags, up to the point that I am SO close to converting Marco to become a bag lady gentleman, too. I never go shopping without them, and I always carry a little fold-up bag around with me. You never know what you might need it for! Maybe it's the deeply engrained German heritage, as we don't get free plastic bags in supermarkets in Germany and people usually bring their own carrier bags when they go grocery shopping.

So the idea of a canvas bag wedding favour was born. I thought long and hard about where I wanted to go with the idea without spending too much and researched several suppliers. I thought up a slogan for the bag, which I am still mighty proud of. FOREVER AND EVER AFTER! Because that's how long Marco and I are planning to stay together, and also because our guests will be able to use their bag again and again!

I first had the notion of hand-embroidering the slogan on the bags, but when I envisaged how long that might take me, I immediately started thinking of alternatives. Cue The Clever Baggers. This is an online company that will print or heat transfer anything you like on loads of fabric based items.

I send them the wording in the same font that I had used for our stationary, Home Sweet Home, and they sent me a proof bag. I was pretty happy with the result (I went for the heat transfer option) and ordered all the favour bags in sets of different colours. The Clever Baggers offer a quantity discount and I also received a 5% off voucher with the invoice for my proof, so the price per bag was quite reasonable.

I rolled up all the bags and adorned them with a pretty ribbon. We then placed one on each place setting at the reception, it looked a lot like a napkin and had some people confused at first. But I think everybody was happy when they discovered their little gift.

What about you other married or engaged people? What did you have for favours, if you had any? What are you planning to give your guests? Or are you breaking with the tradition altogether? Is there a different tradition in your country? I would love to hear about it!

Marco and I both like to travel and have been on quite a few trips together. To represent our wanderlust I decided that I would give our reception tables place names instead of numbers.

I made a list of places that we had been together or would like to visit, of cities and countries that meant something to us.

I then googled for images of vintage travel posters for all the locations, which I printed out and inserted into these cool retro Tolsby frames that I got from IKEA. I bought them for £0.99 each, which I thought was an absolute steal.

I made a table plan for our guests by listing their names alphabetically together with their "destination" for the evening.

In the picture below you can see that each table is represented by a little circular map of its location. I fixed everything on a foam display board that I bought at Paperchase and placed it on an easel by the entrance to the function room.

Tuesday, 26 July 2011

Even though in Germany couples do not really send out the Save The Date cards, I really like this custom. I thought it was especially suited to Marco's and my wedding, as we have so many friends and family living all over the world (in Canada, Germany, South Africa, Australia, and Switzerland). All these people had to book time off work and organize travel, so the idea of letting them know our wedding date as soon as possible was excellent. I had always wanted to design the wedding stationary myself, because I like a challenge, and I like saving money. So as soon as we knew that the registry office would be free on our chosen day, I got to making the first item of our wedding stationary. They were sent in February for our August wedding.

I researched Save The Date ideas for hours and also had to think about the colour scheme. Marco and I wanted it to be a fun, informal wedding, so I decided to go with an assortment of cheerful, bright, summery colours.

I also wanted the stationary to have a definite homemade feel, and to reflect my love for crafting. The craft that I consider "my craft" is cross stitching, so I wanted to incorporate that somehow. I found the perfect free font for this. It's called Home Sweet Home and can be downloaded free from dafont.com. It's the same font I am using for my blog header.

In Word, I designed the following template:

There were some websites that offered to print custom made fridge magnets, and I thought that was such a cute idea! Marco and I have a thing for fridge magnets, and I liked imagining our guests using one as a little reminder of things to come. I purchased printable magnetic sheets, and below is a little image of one of the finished magnets (apologies for the cat hair that got scanned along with it...). The magnetic sheets were very thin and light, and easy to cut. Again, I simply designed it with Word.

I then used a Fiskars 3-in-1 corner punch, to prettify the print outs and mounted them on postcard sized coloured cardboard. I fixed some photo corners around the heart in the middle to hold the little magnet in place. Here is the whole Save The Date assembled, in its German version:

For envelopes, I just used a lot of different coloured ones, reflecting the colours from the card. I wanted the envelopes to look quite pretty, so that people would be aware they were getting exciting mail right away. I printed address labels from a free template I found on Creature Comforts, and used a calligraphy pen to write the addresses. For stamps, I had found some unused vintage ones to buy at a slightly cheaper price than the stamps would have cost me at the post office.

Then I had a slight stroke of madness inspiration and decided to embroider a cross stitch heart on each of the 50+ flaps. I first tried to just embroider on unprepared paper, but discovered that the pressure of the needle going through the paper would make it look creased and untidy, and obviously my eye sight is not so precise that I would get even stitches.

So I had the idea of pre-punching the holes through the paper first, which worked a dream. For this, I printed out a template of the heart (to get a heart in Home Sweet Home, you use the * key).

I then placed the envelope on a self healing craft mat and punched the required holes through the template and the envelope.

After that, it was really easy to stitch the heart. I used differently coloured strands of Anchor floss, always to compliment the colour of the envelopes.

Here's it finished:

Then Marco and I stuffed all the envelopes and kissed them goodbye before we dropped them in the mailbox. It was a really happy feeling to post a stack of rainbow letters, knowing that this was kind of the seal on everything and made the beginning of the rest of our lives official.

My sources? eBay, eBay, eBay! I think I bought most of the tools and the material I used on eBay. It was always at a good price, and delivery was quick and smooth with all of the sellers I bought from. It's where I got the magnetic sheets, the card, the envelopes, the corner punch, the photo corners, the stamps, and the calligraphy pen. I just always make sure that sellers have a good feedback record!